Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the websites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature we offer. While the regular way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you shall only need to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.